oke wrote:I think the lay-public underestimates or misunderstands what a major deal it would be to actually change the thinking in a discipline -- this is what the best scientists are always striving for, and it would be a total life/career-making breakthrough, but very few people achieve this because we set the bar for evidence extremely high.
So for instance, when 99 out of 100 scientists say they're convinced by evidence of human-caused climate change, it took DECADES of work and internal argument to get to that point.
That is not what I'm talking about. What I mean is that science doesn't come up with new ideas to explain anything unless it has to. It explains things with constructs of old ideas and calls it a theory whether it makes sense or not, as long as it makes successful predictions.
Geology is not in so bad a state as astrophysics, but is a good enough example because it uses chemistry, into which is woven quantum mechanics, whose general perspective is that of looking at "particles" or tiny little things. Though it's understood these things aren't like the big things, and can't be thought of the same way, that they are conceptualized as things at all shows a bias in how the science developed. The built-in limitations and tortured ontology, things simultaneously there and not there, in the study of subatomic particles should be taken as a sign that the approach may be wrong - maybe if it were framed some other way it would make more sense. But science isn't good at philosophy.
With general relativity it's worse. The use of non-Euclidean geometries begs the question of what "space-time" is that it can be shaped thus, but no serious inquiry is made. It's enough to science that it works, not to bother about what the concepts actually mean.